How to insert special characters in Google Docs

Three ways to find a character in the picker

• By name. Type arrow, heart, check, currency or degree in the search box. The search matches the official Unicode character names, so tick finds nothing but check finds the check marks.
• By code point. Paste the code point in the search box, with or without the U+ prefix. Searching 2192 lands on the rightwards arrow.
• By drawing. Sketch the shape in the pad on the right and Docs offers matching characters. This is genuinely the fastest route when you know what a symbol looks like but not what it is called.
• By category. The two dropdowns narrow to a group such as Arrows or Punctuation, then to a subgroup such as Dingbats or Quotation marks.

Automatic substitution for characters you use daily

Opening the picker every time gets old. Under Tools, then Preferences, then the Substitutions tab, you can map a string you type to a character Docs inserts. Add an entry that replaces a marker such as two colons followed by deg with the degree sign, and it fires as soon as you type it.

The same tab is where the built-in substitutions live, including the one that turns straight quotes into curly quotes. If you paste code into a document and the quotes keep changing, clear the smart quotes checkbox here rather than fixing them by hand each time.

Sheets and Slides have no picker

Insert, then Special characters, only exists in Docs and Slides. Google Sheets has no picker at all. In Sheets, use the UNICHAR function with the decimal code point: the formula UNICHAR(8594) returns a rightwards arrow, and UNICHAR(10003) returns a check mark. Wrap it in a cell you then copy and paste as a value if you want the character rather than the formula.

The reverse function is UNICODE, which returns the code point of the first character of a string. UNICODE with a pasted character tells you exactly which character you are looking at, which settles most arguments about hyphens versus dashes.

Why the search box matches names and not nicknames

The picker searches the official Unicode character names, not the words people use in conversation. That is why searching for tick returns nothing while check returns the check marks, and why searching for money returns nothing while currency returns the signs.

Two habits work around it. Search for the formal word first: check rather than tick, currency rather than money, arrow rather than pointer. And when that fails, use the drawing pad instead, which sidesteps naming entirely. Sketching a rough tick finds the check marks in a second, including the heavy and boxed variants you would otherwise have to know the names of.

The category dropdowns are the third route and the most underused. Narrowing to Arrows and then to a subgroup gives you the whole block laid out at once, which is how you discover that the arrow you wanted exists in a curved, hooked and double-stroke variant as well.

Docs, Sheets and Slides behave differently on purpose

The picker exists in Docs and Slides because both are layout surfaces where inserting a character at a cursor position is a normal action. Sheets has no picker because its cells hold data, and the equivalent operation there is a formula rather than an insertion.

That is why UNICHAR matters more in Sheets than it first looks. A formula gives you a character that recalculates, which is useful when the character depends on a value: a cell that shows a tick when a status column reads done is a single IF wrapped around UNICHAR. Converting the formula to a static value afterwards is one paste-special away if the sheet is going to be exported.

The reverse function, UNICODE, is the diagnostic. Point it at a cell containing a character you did not type yourself and it returns the code point, which settles immediately whether you are looking at a hyphen or an en dash, a degree sign or a masculine ordinal indicator.

Fonts, exports and what survives them

A character inserted through the picker is stored as the character, not as a font trick, which is what makes Google Docs safer than the Wingdings habit that Word tutorials encourage. Export the document to Word, to PDF or to plain text and the character survives all three, because there is nothing font-specific about it.

What can change is how it looks. Docs falls back per character when the selected font has no glyph, and the fallback font differs between the browser view, the PDF export and the mobile app. A symbol that renders in a light weight on screen can come out slightly heavier in the PDF. The character is identical; only the drawing came from elsewhere.

If exact appearance matters, check the export rather than the editor, and prefer characters from the widely covered blocks: arrows, currency, mathematical operators and the basic dingbats. The decorative and recently added blocks are where fallback differences show up first.

Sharing a document that contains symbols

Because the characters are plain text, a collaborator opening your document sees the same code points you inserted. What they may not see is the same glyph, for the same font-coverage reason as above, and their platform decides that independently of yours.

This matters most for characters that have both a text and an emoji presentation. A heart or an arrow that renders monochrome for you can arrive coloured for a colleague on a different platform, without either of you having changed anything. If a document has to look identical for everyone, prefer the characters that have no emoji presentation at all, and check the guide on why symbols show as boxes for how to tell which is which.

Copy and paste is still the shortest path

Every character in this reference pastes into Docs, Sheets and Slides as plain text. Because they are text and not images, they inherit the surrounding font, size and colour, and they keep working when you export the document to Word or to PDF.